Labs

Offering the widest selection of optimisation and customisation tools of any program on test, Advanced System Optimizer includes some powerful utilities logically arranged into categories. We were impressed by its thoroughness in removing junk files and invalid entries from the Registry. Before making

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any changes, the Registry cleaner and defragmenter utilities offer a one-click backup of your current configuration and create a system restore point, which you can 'roll back' to if you need to. As with TuneUp Utilities, there's a Rescue Centre utility that can undo any changes if your system responds in an unexpected way.

However, some of the numerous utilities were of dubious usefulness. We wouldn't expect to find an appointments scheduler and media organiser in a system utility suite. We'd also question the value of the Safe Uninstaller, which just invokes the program's own uninstaller, as you'd normally do in the Windows Control Panel. The utility names and help files are poorly translated, and some of them aren't Vista-compatible. These glitches give the impression of an unfinished product, and the inclusion of extra 'bonus' utilities ultimately doesn't compensate for this.